Sultan Sufyan
You can Kodo the daylights out of an oud chip for hours on end, or you can fry it on a scorching coal and be done in a minute. But an untrained nose has trouble picking up the subtleties of low temp heating, while a trained nose hates to…
Sultan Sufyan is the black sheep in the Sultan Series.
Don’t expect an airy, ethereal profile. The scent throws you into a stunning olfactory canyon right in the heart of New Guinea. To bathe in hot springs emitting the most pristine incense vapor, as if they’re bubbling up the very scent of the jungle. And, forget it, there’s zero fruit here – nothing but unabashed oudiness! And wait till you see the ritual-like incense-heating scent progression…
You can Kodo the daylights out of an oud chip for hours on end, or you can fry it on a scorching coal and be done in a minute. But an untrained nose has trouble picking up the subtleties of low temp heating, while a trained nose hates to waste all the intricate notes that get incinerated at high temp. The beauty of Sultan Sufyan is the sheer spectrum of incence-y oudiness that wafts at you in waves.
The top notes are pure low temp tenderness. Pristine, blue-green kinamic notes right on par with Sultan Abdül Hamit. Then, as if you’re turning the dial of the heater up a notch, oh so gradually, the oudiness begins to intensify. The chip starts to bubble, there’s a flush of resin oozing its way out until the smoke clouds the whole room. Then, that rush you get when you smell the sticky raw resin stuck to your mica plate. It doesn’t smell like the unheated chip, nor the vapor. More like a silhouette of aloelicious essence. That’s Sufyan’s dry down right there.
But more than taking you from low temp through high, down to the post-burn residue, you’ve got an oud oil that gives you even more. Notes that heated agarwood never can. A sensualness, a mystique, a microscopic zoom into crevices of the oud aroma you’d never get to indulge in otherwise.
Sultan Sufyan captures the Papuan jungle as daytime turns dark. Crickets chirp and beetles rattle as they never would sun out. Your feet sink into the luscious soil as the sheer immediacy of the jungle air smacks your cheeks, your lips, your nose, the back of your neck with a feeling of naked adventure. You've got the same quality raw materials that went into crafting Sultan Osman, cooked in the same steel pot – but that’s where the similarities end…
This is the last New Guinea cooking in the Sultan Series, collected and cured mid 2015. And it is the most unconventional. This fragrance adds to your collection an oud that is bold and beautiful, an infatuated incense lover’s dream come true, with so much earthy soul even a Maroke ouddict won’t want to put the dipstick back.
